I was hoping you'd actually read my post before you replied, but here we are.

I'll repeat it again, UPGRADES to Windows 7-8-10-11 were all free. Buying the whole OS isn't upgrading. Windows offers free OS upgrades, same as everyone else.

And Apple does deliberately require hardware upgrades and stops supporting video cards (NVIDIA), with OpenCore Legacy Patcher showing these aren't needed in order to upgrade.

And this was all based on the starting arguement of "By forcing your customers to upgrade by means of: Dark patterns, threats, coercion, arbitrary expiration dates, and on and on." There never was a point of "free OS upgrades" or not. That was something you added to distract from the original point.

Maybe you should look at the whole picture and not being a Apple apologist and claiming that even though Apple does the EXACT same thing, that they are somehow completely different.

PS, I use Linux, so no, I'm not a MS apologist.

When they are some of the longest supporters of hardware in the commerical space?

Yes.

Microsoft on average will support hardware for 10 years. macOS, iOS, and Android average 7 years. Only ChromeOS supports 10 years.

Apple kills all OS support on hardware after 7 years (4 major OS updates, and that final one will get 3 total years of security updates). Microsoft typically gives 10 years of support. This isn't a good thing.
Android and iOS typically have the same 7ish years on hardware, again, not quite the flex you were hoping for.
The only one that can match would be ChromeOS which typically has the same 10 years.

And Windows 8, 10, and 11 were all free upgrades so this again matches (assuming the hardware was supported, same as all the others).

Name a commercial OS that doesn't also do this?

>> only one source for iOS devices. Many sources for Android.

> Are there?

Who else makes iOS devices? You already acknowledged there many sources of Android devices.

Also, while 7 out of 10 sounds good, this represents less than 20% of the total market. And Apple only makes "premium" class phones so this would be their only market. A more accurate title to this would be "Apple sells less than 1 out of every 5 smartphones", and since you've already pointed out that for the most part there seems to be only 3 major Android companies and 1 iPhone maker, that makes it look worse as out of 4 major companies you'd want to be making at least 1 out of every 4.

I think it's the whole "blood in the water" effect. Google Play Store and Apple App Store are being sued and losing, so next target that could match is Steam.

The issues I see here is that Steam isn't anything like the other two. Steam isn't the default app store of any OS besides SteamOS, and even it gives more easy access to competing stores then Android. Not to mention, this lawsuit is based on sales from 2018, way before SteamOS was revived, so it wouldn't apply. Because of this, the lawsuit can't claim a lack of competition due to muscling out others from "their" devices.

While they can claim that Steam is the largest player and thus a monopoly, it wouldn't work because they aren't using their size negatively against their competition. They aren't blocking others on their devices, they aren't putting up road blocks to competitors, and unless I'm missing something they haven't been making deals to prevent competition. Google and Apple have had court loses due to these types of abuses of power, but again, unless I'm missing something, Valve hasn't done any of those.

Maybe Google is copying Apple here and using it to sell ads.

If you read the privacy policy of Apple Pay, it does mention that Apple does collect info about your Apple Pay usage for ads ("Helping you to discover features that are most relevant to you", "Sending you communications about Apple Pay and other Apple products, services, and offers that may be of interest to you" is how they refer to it.)

"Apple may use this information to improve other Apple products and services, for marketing, and for fraud and security purposes."

They go back largely because MS will give them deep discounts. MS has four decades of experience of undercutting potential competition with loss leaders and similar tactics. The motives then were largely that open source represented significant savings, but now it's about data and technology sovereignty.

I have no idea what any of this means, or has to do with Harris or Walz.

You mean, the couldn't stomach a sane government run by rational people?

In the short term it would most certainly hit profits, not merely because of lower revenues from interest, but because credit card is unsecured, bad debts taking a bigger bite out of profits. The ultimate result would be that it would become much harder to get a credit card. In the end consumers would effectively have their short-term lending capacity reduced.

> will put privacy protections in place that matches it's corporate policy.

Which when you actually read Apples privacy policy isnt much different than Googles.

There's this guy who came up with E=MC^2. The photon's energy can be converted to massless particles under certain conditions, such as the production of electron-positron pairs.

This demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of what light and gravity. Photons in a vacuum follow the curvature of space, that curvature being gravity. Mass bends space, the more extreme the mass, the greater the curvature, which photons follow. But the photons themselves have no mass.

Nobody ever went broke assuming people are ignorant morons.